


kissing, kissed

by susiecarter



Series: Superbat Week [2]
Category: DC Extended Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: Buddy Breathing, Developing Relationship, Kissing, M/M, Partnership, Post-Canon, Sex Pollen, Superbat Week 2020, Translation Available, True Love's Kiss, Undercover, X-ray Vision
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:14:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25537894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/susiecarter/pseuds/susiecarter
Summary: Bruce and Clark work together, make use of x-ray vision, maintain an unexpectedly necessary pretense, get the better of magic, get the better of "science", buddy-breathe—and then, finally, kiss.Or: six times Bruce and Clark kissed for ~reasons, plus the first time they did it just because they wanted to. (Written for Superbat Week 2020.)
Relationships: Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne
Series: Superbat Week [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1872772
Comments: 522
Kudos: 877





	1. knew the drill by now

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文-普通话 國語 available: [【超蝙超】吻与吻 by SusieCarter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28727868) by [lucelucid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucelucid/pseuds/lucelucid)
  * Translation into Русский available: [целуя, получая поцелуи](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29177382) by [jaejandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaejandra/pseuds/jaejandra)



> Superbat Week is here again! And 6 + 1 things worked so well last time, how could I give it up? So, yeah, same deal: there will be one chapter of this for each of the daily prompts I chose from this year's selection, and I'll be posting one per day. :D
> 
> The main title and each of the chapter titles are adapted from the poem "[The Kisser](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/54097/the-kisser)" by Dora Malech, because I'm awful at titles and I need all the help I can get.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Superbat Week 2020 Day 1 prompt: "working together".

This investigation isn't going well.

Or at least it doesn't seem to Clark like it is. Admittedly, he's not exactly privy to all the details. He'd been surprised enough that Bruce had even asked him to come along; if Bruce had actually given him full access to the files and told him precisely what was going on, he'd have had to trigger an alert and quarantine Bruce in the Hall until Diana could lasso him, just to make sure he wasn't a double from another dimension or something.

Besides, it didn't matter if it was a little inconvenient. It didn't matter if it was a little difficult. That's just Bruce—and Clark wanted to help him, wanted to prove that he could and would and that Bruce could rely on him, more than he wanted the whole picture.

They've been doing really well with this thing they're trying out where they're colleagues. They're colleagues, and teammates, and maybe even sort of friends, and there's no attempted murder involved at all.

Well, except possibly by the men they're currently trying to track down.

There's more to it than that on Clark's end. He recognizes the way he thinks about Bruce, the way he chases after Bruce's attention and approval and the sparking heat that fills him every time he gets it wrong and they fight about it—the way he thinks about Bruce's face, his shoulders, his eyes. He knows these things for what they are, and he has for months.

But he's realistic about it. He tries to be realistic about it. Bruce asking him to assist, Bruce _trusting_ him to be useful and not screw this up, means so much coming from Bruce that Clark's still a little bit bowled over that it even happened.

And the most important thing Bruce emphasized while he was briefing Clark this morning was the need to keep this quiet, to not draw attention. Bruce doesn't want this particular organization to know that _anyone_ is after them at all, let alone the Justice League—let alone Batman and Superman.

Which would be why, now that they're being tailed straight into a dead end, Clark isn't just grabbing Bruce and taking off into the air.

And presumably it's also why Bruce isn't swarming up the wall, either.

Bruce has a hand on Clark's elbow. Clark follows his lead and keeps walking, even though this alley is _definitely_ a dead end. And—

And they're in Gotham, Clark thinks. They're in Gotham, which means Bruce can't possibly have turned and brought them in here by mistake.

Bruce must have some kind of plan.

"Bruce," he says, keeping his voice low, not quite a question.

Bruce flicks him a glance and angles them off to one side, toward a wall just past the base of a fire escape—that had been Clark's best guess as to Bruce's chosen exit strategy, but apparently he missed the mark.

(Not a _good_ guess: he'd already been thinking it was going to be too loud, too obvious, all that clattering metal and no reasonable excuse for a man in a suit as nice as Bruce's to be taking a fire escape going up. But the best one he had.)

"People who want to lose a tail don't trap themselves in a dead end," Bruce says, clipped, businesslike, guiding Clark back against the wall; Clark turns under his hand, puts his shoulders to the brick, and Bruce doesn't stop him from doing it so it must not be the wrong move to make.

And Clark can see his point, but it seems like a bit much to ask that logic to be enough to give pause to whoever's following them—as if people who are nervous, unsettled, who are worried about someone after them for seeing something they weren't supposed to see, never make mistakes or take a wrong turn? _Clark_ knows Bruce didn't bring them here by accident, but that's because he knows Bruce. The chumps tailing them have no idea who it is they're trying to corner here.

He's about to say so, the words right there in his mouth.

And then, abruptly, he becomes aware of exactly how close Bruce is. He walked Clark over to this wall, let him turn to face Bruce, but hasn't—hasn't done any of the things Clark might have expected, hasn't moved away or pushed Clark down out of sight of the mouth of the alley. He hasn't even let go of Clark's elbow; the weight of his hand feels suddenly disproportionately significant, the warmth of it leaching steadily through Clark's own suit jacket.

In point of fact, if he's doing anything it's crowding Clark back against the wall more and more closely.

He hasn't given Clark any indication that he'd like Clark to stop him, that his plan relies on Clark playacting his way through some degree of resistance. Clark stands there, heart in his throat, and doesn't hold Bruce off. But—jesus.

"Bruce—"

"Therefore," Bruce murmurs, level, "we must not have been trying to lose a tail when we turned this way. It must not matter to us whether this alley goes anywhere. We must have chosen it for another reason having nothing to do with its merits as a shortcut, or lack thereof." He pauses. His eyes are dark, intent. He's— _touching_ Clark; both hands, now, one still curled around Clark's arm and the other smoothing its way as if absently up Clark's lapel, an inch at a time. "We must be undertaking some other activity for which an alley is well-suited."

Clark feels his ears go hot. Bruce doesn't mean that the way it sounds, said so quietly in that voice, black coffee and gravel. He can't. Surely he can't. Surely Clark's just grasping at straws, following his own wishful thinking down the garden path. Bruce is probably about to lean in and say, _So give me your best impression of an inexperienced new mob lieutenant agreeing to take a bribe, if you wouldn't mind_ —

Bruce's hand has followed Clark's lapel to his collar, and is letting the curve lead it unhesitatingly to the nape of Clark's neck; Bruce's fingers slide into Clark's hair and grip firmly, in a way that makes Clark want to tilt his head back into it and let his eyes fall shut. He doesn't do it, but it's a close thing. His heart is pounding—he can feel it in his throat, his ribs, his wrists.

"Bruce," he says, breathless, uncertain, barely over a whisper.

Bruce kisses him.

Just a brush of his mouth, for a half-second. Testing, Clark thinks distantly. Waiting to see whether Clark will go along with this, too.

And then he uses that grip on Clark's hair to tilt Clark's head into it, and it changes. His tongue, his teeth: it's long, filthy, _deep_ , the kind of kissing you lean into and part your thighs for. Lingering, made to last—intense and then easing, a coaxing give-and-take, Bruce pushing the pretense that Clark is a human who needs oxygen to its limits and then gentling, slowing, withdrawing almost completely, leaving Clark to chase him mindlessly instead.

Clark's so caught up he's almost forgotten what they're doing here, why this is even happening. He feels lit up, incandescent with the touch of Bruce's mouth on his, Bruce's hands on him, Bruce's body against him—

Bruce's grip on him tightens the barest degree. Clark follows the implicit instruction, and doesn't break it; lets Bruce hold him there and ease away, even though that's about the last thing he wants to do.

God, Bruce's mouth is so _red_. Clark can't stop staring at it.

"We've been seen and summarily dismissed as unimportant. We'll be clear to leave in a few minutes."

Clark swallows, and wets his lips, and manages to drag his gaze up. "A few minutes," he repeats.

He doesn't mean for it to sound leading. He's still trying to catch up, that's all, still dazed and undone; he just wants to be sure that he heard Bruce right, that he understood what Bruce said.

But Bruce gives him a look, steady, hotly piercing, and Clark feels himself flush. It wasn't supposed to sound suggestive. If Bruce is pissed, then Clark will say as much. But if Bruce doesn't mind, if Bruce takes it the way Clark didn't mean it and _doesn't mind_ —

One of Bruce's hands moves, just a little, on Clark's jaw. He reaches out with his thumb, catches Clark's lower lip with it and presses into the curve of it, drags it down—and Clark is aware, all of a sudden, of how wet his mouth is, how cool the night air feels against it, how quickly his breath is coming.

"A few minutes," Bruce agrees. "And it would be best to maintain the pretense until we've left the immediate area, in any case."

Clark has about half a second to imagine what that might mean—stumbling out of this alley together, hands all over each other; pausing on the next corner, or two, or three, to kiss some more, if less thoroughly, just in case anyone's watching—before Bruce is kissing him again.

Harder, hungrier, and jesus, Clark's toes are curling in his shoes.

It's for a reason. Bruce isn't doing this because he wants to. But if this is Bruce's under-duress need-a-cover spur-of-the-moment kissing, Clark can't even begin to imagine what he must be like when he actually wants you.

And god, it almost doesn't matter that Bruce doesn't mean it the way Clark wants him to—that he's doing it at all, that he decided on this plan ten minutes ago knowing this was where it was going, that he was _willing_ to; that he trusted Clark to let him, to let him and make it look good—

Maybe that just means he knows, Clark thinks dimly. Maybe he was well aware Clark wouldn't push him away, would jump at the chance to have this even if it was only for a minute. Would be able to tell the most convincing lie in the world, because it wouldn't be a lie at all.

But even that thought barely manages to sting. Because that means something, too: that Bruce trusts him to control himself, to not take this the wrong way or get hung up on it, to not ruin whatever tentative partnership they're building over it.

And he won't. It matters to him too much.

But that doesn't mean he's not going to take this and savor it, if Bruce is willing to let him. It's more than he was ever expecting; it's a gift, even, and given the only way Bruce could ever give it to him. And he's going to volunteer himself to serve as Bruce's backup on every single case Batman's working, if it means that even one night in a thousand is going to end like this.


	2. are we there yet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Superbat Week 2020 Day 2 prompt: "x-ray vision". Will I ever get tired of spurious excuses for Bruce to hit on Clark in dimly-lit clubs? ALL SIGNS POINT TO NO

Bruce had had every intention of maintaining an appropriate distance from Clark, after bringing Superman back from the dead.

The facts, after all, are inarguable. Clark fought Bruce, and nearly died. Clark fought alongside Bruce, and _did_ die. Proximity, overinvolvement, represent proven hazards.

He hadn't expected distance to be difficult to achieve. Clark wouldn't want anything to do with him—what reason was there to think otherwise? But Bruce had taken steps, all the same. Bruce had formed a team, positioned himself and Clark as merely two parts of a greater whole; Clark had backup, other heroes to call upon in times of need. Bruce had made conciliatory overtures, had rendered assistance to Clark's mother, but had succeeded in framing these as carrying no particular weight: _It's like a reflex with me._

But it's become apparent that there are two factors he'd failed to account for. Clark's relentless, inexplicable, inexorable generosity of spirit is one of them. And Bruce's own inability to refrain from inexcusable self-indulgence is the other.

Clark is attracted to Bruce. Bruce knows that. On one level, of course, it's bizarre, disorienting, and utterly incomprehensible. Clark's personal judgment is clearly terrible; Lois Lane must have been the exception rather than the rule.

But on another level, it's understandable. Bruce Wayne is attractive—that's a fact, and one Bruce has used to his advantage before. Bruce Wayne is attractive, and Bruce and Clark do interact regularly, if only as colleagues at minimum and friendly acquaintances at maximum. Batman is competent. Clark's aesthetic appreciation for Bruce Wayne's presentation, and practical appreciation for Batman's skill, in combination, are probably sufficient to explain the way Clark looks at Bruce sometimes when he thinks Bruce can't tell.

Kissing him was—

Kissing him was reasonable. Kissing him should, if anything, have put him off. Two birds with one stone: Bruce could allow himself the experience, and Clark—Clark should have perceived it as manipulative, should have been disconcerted by Bruce's bloodless tactical assessments before and after.

Clark wasn't supposed to look at him like that. Clark wasn't supposed to look at him like that, he wasn't supposed to let Bruce touch him; he wasn't supposed to stand there in that alleyway and surrender utterly to Bruce's hands on him.

And he _definitely_ wasn't supposed to be willing to do it again.

Clark's assistance has only been offered more freely, since Bruce overstepped in that alley. Bruce refuses to accept that assistance as often as possible. It would be unjustifiable, under the circumstances, for missions that are uninteresting, banal—missions that require at most an extra pair of hands, that demand none of Superman's specific talents at all.

But he can't always afford to. Because Superman's specific talents are, at times, demanded.

The ability to call upon Clark's sensory capabilities at will has dramatically altered Bruce's approach on-mission. He can seize opportunities that would have posed tremendous risk and tremendous challenges; he can eliminate the need for scanning equipment that might otherwise provoke suspicion. He has a walking, talking crime lab, plus or minus a detailed x-ray machine that can be aimed in any direction and functions at essentially any distance, that exhorts him on a regular basis to make use of it at will.

And at times, the reasons to give in outweigh the reasons not to.

In this particular case, Bruce is seeking evidence that's most likely secured in the back room of a public establishment. He certainly _could_ go to the effort to circumvent what is genuinely impressive security and break in; his time within would undoubtedly be sharply limited, his targets would be alerted to his interest, and if he's miscalculated and the evidence isn't there after all, he'd be starting at square one—a scrubbing operation would undoubtedly commence that would make his job twice as hard.

Or—he can walk into this club through the front door, bring Clark with him, and ask Clark to look through the wall.

They don't enter together, of course. Bruce Wayne makes time for a wild night out on the town now and then, and this club's seedy reputation would only attract him; but he wouldn't come with a reporter on his arm.

Clark Kent is easier. He's unlikely to be recognized by anyone in here. He's just a ludicrously handsome, slightly uncomfortable man having a drink—waiting for a friend, or a date, and visibly conscious that he doesn't quite fit in. The simplest cover in the world.

Bruce flirts outrageously with the bartender, obtains a fluorescently blue drink, and settles in on the opposite side of the club floor; it doesn't take long for him to be approached by an employee and invited to enjoy his choice of one of the private seating areas. Not an unusual gesture, given the way Bruce Wayne throws his money around when he gets drunk enough. Bruce readily accepts.

The one he chooses is positioned for a clear view of the bar, and of Clark. Bruce pretends to recognize someone through the dimness and colored lights, and within ten minutes has a handful of very pretty, very drunk people arrayed around him. These things are always easier with a little camouflage.

He has excuses to look toward the bar. Gesturing for additional drinks, looking idly for additional company. He has the opportunity to notice it when the set of Clark's shoulders grows tense with frustration, when Clark starts adjusting his glasses too often—stressed, unintentionally over-repeating a usually casual tic.

Bruce lurches up out of his seat with a smile, and determinedly crosses the dance floor himself, seemingly having overlooked the selection of drinks already in front of him. He reaches the bar, waves at the bartender—pushes his way closer when that gambit fails to catch the bartender's attention, stumbling just a little, and knocks into Clark's shoulder.

He orchestrated this interaction. He sees Clark almost every day. How can it still constitute a blow capable of knocking the breath from him, to have Clark's eyes meet his?

"Sorry, sorry," Bruce Wayne says, slickly insincere, and then pauses, blinking, and performs a blatant double-take. "My apologies," he adds, with markedly greater warmth. "Let me buy you a drink?"

"Oh," Clark says, ducking his head, touching his glasses again. "I, um."

The bartender arrives, presumably having been made aware that Bruce Wayne's been trying to catch her attention. Bruce orders four, and then nudges one toward Clark and leers, swaying closer.

Close enough to catch the sidelong glance Clark flicks at him, and to hear Clark mutter, " _Really_?"

Bruce's smile widens, unbidden. He knocks back one drink right there, and then leans in and settles a hand on Clark's shoulder, mouth to Clark's ear: "What is it?"

"I'm sorry," Clark murmurs, barely audible, in return. "I know this is taking too long."

For Christ's sake. Bruce wouldn't even have been able to pull this off at all without him, and he's worried about their timetable?

"I'm not as good at this as you are," Clark's adding, without hesitation. And then he turns away a little, clears his throat, and glances over his shoulder—a reasonable action for a man desperate for an excuse to escape from Bruce Wayne's attentions, but he's looking at the back wall. The wall the room is behind.

Of course. Bruce should have realized. It's the logistics he's struggling with.

Bruce leans in to make up the distance Clark put between them, and catches Clark under the chin with the side of one knuckle, drawing Clark's face back toward him; forward, but that only makes it a more appropriate maneuver for Bruce Wayne. "The files," he says in an undertone, mouth slanting, with the dirtiest delivery he can manage.

Clark flushes, just a little. And fuck, Bruce shouldn't be doing this to him, not again, but he wets his lips and meets Bruce's eyes again and doesn't move away.

"There are a lot of them. I can go page-by-page, that's not a problem." As if it isn't inconceivably amazing that he's able to see them at all, let alone to adjust the range of his x-ray vision by the width of a sheet of paper, rifling his way through a filing cabinet without so much as laying a hand on it. "But I'm—I can't just keep staring at the same spot on the back wall, Bruce." A flicker of amusement. "I'm not nearly that drunk yet."

Bruce swallows, and reaches for another drink.

Standing in the right place would be enough. Making conversation, giving Clark a reason to look in Bruce's direction while they talk. That's all.

"Easy fix," he says aloud, sliding his hand down the line of Clark's back, Clark's cheap jacket doing nowhere near enough to disguise the strength in it, the shift of muscle under Bruce's palm. Christ. He can't decide whether he's too drunk for this, or not drunk enough. "Just play along, hmm?"

Clark does.

Clark allows himself to be guided back across the room. Clark lets Bruce Wayne hang all over him, looks dubious at Bruce's bad lines and helplessly amused at the worse ones. Bruce gets him into a seat that happens to face the back wall, one end of the curving sectional that rounds the low table—stretches his arm out along the back of it, rubs his thumb along the side of Clark's throat, and Clark—

Clark Kent would get up and leave, if he weren't at least a little bit won over. But Clark can't, and Bruce has to remember that.

It works. It gives Clark cover. That's what matters.

Clark had to pay attention, while they were on the way over here. But once they're settled in, the rest of the script straightforward, Bruce is prepared for his eyes to stop tracking, his focus to pass through Bruce and into the middle distance.

Bruce is prepared for Clark to look at him without seeing him. That always has been, on so many more levels than the most immediate, the goal.

"All right," he says, quiet, and settles his free hand as low on Clark's thigh as seems plausible, given that he's depicting Bruce Wayne interacting with a man who looks like this and hasn't thrown a drink in his face yet. "I'm going to keep talking. It won't be anything important. Let me know if you need me to make an adjustment, but I assume you won't have any trouble seeing through me."

Clark's mouth slants. It's wry—wistful. No longer, Bruce is abruptly aware, the expression of Clark Kent, putting up with Bruce Wayne's terrible come-ons. "Literally? No," Clark murmurs, and then bites his lip. Something crosses his face, then, a strange swift shadow. He reaches out, fingertips gentle against the line of Bruce's jaw. "And I guess if I need another angle, for the sake of the mission, I can do what it takes to find one. Right?"

"Clark," Bruce says, hoarse.

Clark kisses him.

Neatly done, Bruce thinks distantly. Bruce Wayne is the pursuer, in the scenario they've constructed; Bruce has no good reason to stop him, no justification to move away. Bruce made his bed, and now Clark is laying him gently down in it, and Bruce has no one to blame but himself.

Clark probably thinks he's being selfish, taking advantage of Bruce's maneuvering to get something he wants, knowing Bruce won't prevent it. Clark is facing the right way, still, and he can look through his own eyelids as readily as Bruce's head; he might be doing it right now, reading pages, examining photographs, taking account of everything in that room one piece at a time.

He doesn't understand what he's giving Bruce. He doesn't understand what an unearned reward it is, the tender pressure of his mouth, the sweeping slide of his tongue against the inner curve of Bruce's lip, the shyly daring hint of teeth. He doesn't understand that he's done nothing but strike a spark straight into the tinder of Bruce's fixation, that he's simply handed Bruce the excuse to grip the nape of his neck and open up for him and drink him down.

All Bruce can do is hang on, and try to make sure he never will.


	3. heart tied with trip wires

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Superbat Week 2020 Day 3 prompt: "on your knees". I, um. My id _may_ have gotten away from me a little with this one. Oops?

Clark strides along a half-step behind the auctioneer who's ostensibly guiding him, and is distantly grateful for his Kryptonian clothes.

Anything could probably have passed for couture in a sufficiently diverse multitude of aliens; Clark doesn't doubt there are regions of space where everybody and their mother wears thousand-count cloth of gold, and denim qualifies as thrillingly rare and unusual.

But he needed something that was going to make him _feel_ like the person he's supposed to be right now, not just look like it. And the distinctive cool weight of rich, heavy Kryptonian cloth, the authoritative snap of the cape in his wake and the close smooth curve of the shirtcollar high against his throat—all of it reminds him what he's doing here. He keeps his stride long and his chin high, and he pays only the bare minimum of attention to the auctioneer's babbling.

Which would be for the best even if Clark weren't trying to seem arrogantly unconcerned, because if he were listening, he might have to punch this guy in the head.

The auctioneer is blue, six-limbed, and transparently obsequious. Since the moment Clark made his purpose clear, he's been wringing all four of his hands, blinking his six enormous eyes and nervously inclining his head, and going on about all the precautions that are taken to avoid these sorts of mistakes—all the techniques they use here to attempt to ensure that no property already under legitimate ownership is offered for resale.

Jesus Christ. Clark can taste the bile at the back of his throat already.

"—so you see the odds that any of your belongings might have come into our possession in error are—"

"That one," Clark bites out.

He can't see the man's face, but it doesn't matter. That's Bruce.

Bruce, wrapped in something gray and cheap from the waist down, stripped bare from the waist up. Being threatened, berated, at some length. A purple three-clawed appendage is closed in his hair, and a moment later jerks his head up—Clark can't understand what he's seeing, some kind of dark line where he hadn't expected one. A wound, he thinks first, fists clenching, but that isn't what it is.

It's a collar.

The alien threatening Bruce is gesturing to it. Bruce doesn't react. He allowed his head to be dragged up by the grip in his hair, but his gaze is somewhere else, his expression completely blank. The alien makes a furious motion, jabs a finger at the black band of the collar, and veins of sharp blue-white light spark into being along the length of Bruce's arms, down his chest, across the breadth of his shoulders. The muscles at Bruce's jaw stand out harshly, working, but Bruce doesn't make a sound.

Clark isn't aware of deciding to move. He just does it.

Bars enclose the area where the purple alien is punishing Bruce, some unidentifiable metal that glints green from some angles, dull bronze from others. Clark grabs two of them, bends one and wrenches the other out of his way entirely—tosses it over his shoulder, and the auctioneer yelps behind him.

But he can't—he can't screw this up. When he grabs the purple alien's hand and shoves it pointedly away from Bruce's throat, the blue-white light dying and Bruce's body slackening in relief, he doesn't say any of the forty-five ferociously pissed-off things he'd normally have shouted in the guy's face. He says, "You're _damaging my property_ ," and he makes it as coldly irritated as he can get it.

The purple alien makes a dubious noise through its mouthparts.

The auctioneer, who apparently managed to dodge the torn-out bar, hustles up to Clark's elbow. "Imperator Kal of the House of El is asserting prior ownership of this slave," he explains hurriedly.

" _This_ —" The purple alien scoffs furiously. "This is _kindling_ , this is meat! This is not a slave; it could not be made into a slave in a hundred thousand cycles, it is _useless_." It directs its sensory apparatus toward Clark, and clicks its mouthparts dismissively.

And sure, Clark thinks, of course. They'd have been skeptical anyway. This is probably a well-known scam, in the slave-trafficking portions of the known universe: show up, claim a slave you already owned got rounded up by mistake, walk out with a free slave.

But Bruce—Bruce wouldn't have done a single goddamn thing they told him to. Bruce would've made himself as big a pain in the ass as he possibly could. Bruce has probably been ignoring every single order given to him, setting things on fire, and figuring out how to break other slaves-in-training out of their punishment collars at every possible opportunity.

Clark bites down hard on the inside of his cheek, desperately swallowing down the swell of— _fondness_ isn't enough. Sheer stupid adoration is probably more accurate. But he doesn't have time for it. He needs to get a grip.

He clears his throat, and gives the purple alien a cool stare. "Well, of course you had trouble with him. He doesn't follow orders from just anyone." He raises an eyebrow, and leans in a fraction closer. He's not taller than the purple alien, but he's broader, and he did just break bars that are presumably intended to hold slaves of any species without difficulty; by the uncertain clatter of the purple alien's mouthparts, it's remembering that fact right now. "That," Clark adds, enunciating every syllable with deliberate bite, "would be what makes him _mine_."

And jesus, he should have come up with another way to say that, but it's too late now. He _wanted_ to say it, is the thing. He's still sparking with leftover anger that anybody would fucking dare do _any_ of this to—to _anyone_ , obviously, but there's an extra tooth-gritting blaze of fury when it's Bruce. Bruce, who'd gone missing on mission, and the League has been hunting for him with the help of the Lanterns for weeks, and _this_ is where he's been? These people thought they could just _take_ him, and nobody would come looking, nobody would care? These people thought they could just take him away from Clark—

Not that he's Clark's. Which would be another reason it was so desperately goddamn satisfying: getting to at least say the words once, even if they're never going to be as true as Clark wants them to be.

But if they can't be made to _seem_ true long enough for Clark to pull this off, he's not going to be able to get Bruce out of here without causing a lot of trouble they aren't prepared for.

He tilts his chin up, and turns away from the purple alien. He reaches out, steps forward, and touches Bruce's chin with two fingertips.

Bruce has been standing quietly, adopting the same attitude he had when the purple alien was scolding him earlier—seeming not to listen, attention elsewhere, utterly unresponsive.

But when Clark touches him, he lifts his eyes to Clark's instantly.

And all at once, Clark's not doing this alone anymore.

Just feeling the weight, the intensity, of that gaze, unmistakably Bruce's, is basically the sweetest relief Clark's ever felt in his life. He'd known he had to be ready for anything; he'd known Bruce might be injured, might have been beaten or blinded or mindwiped, might not even remember who Clark was. And that had been if he could find Bruce in here at all—if Bruce hadn't already been killed, or passed along to another auction house, or sold.

They're being watched. Clark can't smile at him, can't give him any signals even if Clark had had one prepared.

Clark looks at him, and tilts his head the barest degree, and says quietly, "On your knees."

Bruce stands there, silent, expression unreadable. And then, without looking away, face upturned as if to avoid losing the contact of Clark's fingertips against his jaw, he kneels.

Clark swallows, and digs his teeth into the inside of his lip. This is supposed to be nothing, ordinary, only as much as Imperator Kal of the House of El expects from any slave rightfully his.

But, god—weeks of this, bars and collars and punishment, everything that purple alien had been allowed to do to him to try to get this from him, and Bruce wouldn't do it; and now he'll sink to his knees for Clark just because Clark's told him to—

Because he has to, Clark reminds himself, willing the heat out of his face. Because Bruce was listening, and he isn't stupid, and he knows this is what it's going to take for Clark to walk out of here with him.

And there's still one card left in Clark's hand that he knows Bruce will let him play.

Imperator Kal of the House of El looks down at his temporarily misplaced slave, and allows himself a satisfied smile. "Good," he says, and leans down to give the slave an easy, absent, approving kiss on the mouth.

It isn't, strictly speaking, necessary. But it does complete the picture; it makes more sense for Imperator Kal to have tracked down a personal slave who pleases him than any old member of his household. It also isn't something Clark would've done if he and Bruce hadn't already developed a tacit agreement that kissing doesn't cross a line between them, as long as it suits the mission parameters—it's a convincing portrait of a pre-existing and closely-held understanding because that's exactly what it is.

And Clark can admit that the sheer overwhelming reassurance of having Bruce right here in front of him, of being able to reach out and touch him, definitely doesn't hurt.

He doesn't linger too long. Kal wouldn't. And Bruce—

Bruce kneels there and lets him. _Receives_ him, quietly pliant, surrendering.

Clark draws away, heart pounding, and can't look at him; looks at the auctioneer instead, because the auctioneer won't be able to see whatever it is that's squeezing the air out of his chest right now, and Bruce absolutely will.

God. Maybe Bruce is right not to give him a chance, not to let this thing between them get anywhere. Because what the hell does it say about him, if even the smallest part of him is actually _enjoying_ any of this?

"I am, of course, grateful to have been able to locate him," Clark makes himself say, "and to see that he's been kept alive and functional."

The auctioneer blinks at him hopefully, clasping two hands and spreading the other two. "Why, of course! We pride ourselves on the condition of our merchandise—"

Jesus Christ.

"I hope you'll accept a finder's fee, to compensate you for your efforts," Clark interrupts.

The auctioneer looks briefly puzzled; whatever Clark's personal translation unit came up for as an equivalent to "finder's fee" must have been a little garbled. But the intention to make a payment apparently came through anyway, because the auctioneer says, "Well, we—if the imperator feels it appropriate, how can we refuse?"

It's only reasonable, from their side of the equation. Judging by the purple alien's frustration with Bruce, the auctioneer must not have been expecting to make much off of Bruce even if they did manage to get him to cooperate for the length of an auction sale. A reward offered by his appreciative master might prove equally lucrative, and is taking a good deal less effort.

The Lanterns gave Clark plenty of credits to use for this mission. Clark can afford to be even more generous than the auctioneer's anticipating.

But he can't stop himself from thinking that it's a bargain—that he could never imagine giving Bruce up for so little.

When the deal is made, Clark glances down, and sinks a hand into Bruce's hair. "All right, come on," Imperator Kal of the House of El says, and his slave rises obediently and readily accepts an acknowledging stroke of his fingers.

"I assume the Lanterns have marked those credits," Bruce murmurs hoarsely once they're outside, voice almost swallowed by the noise of the marketplace around them.

"They weren't planning to run a sting on this operation so soon, but you gave them a great excuse to pull one together," Clark agrees. He swallows. "Are you—did that thing—"

"Nerve stimulation," Bruce says. "Pain without injury, excepting potential nerve damage resulting from extensive longterm use."

"Great," Clark grits out.

"Clark," Bruce says.

He can't reach out and grab Clark, not here—not dressed the way he is, shirtless, collared. He can't reach out and grab Imperator Kal.

He doesn't have to. His voice, Clark's name spoken by it, is enough. Clark's already stopped walking.

If he ever said _on your knees_ , Clark thinks distantly, there wouldn't need to be suspicious aliens watching. Clark would just do it.

Clark bites the inside of his cheek, and makes himself meet Bruce's eyes.

"I'm all right," Bruce says. "You came for me in time. Thank you."

Clark closes his eyes.

"Thank you," Bruce repeats, lower, softer—closer.

The touch of Bruce's mouth isn't a surprise. The rules that govern these roles have been established; Bruce can't clap Imperator Kal on the shoulder.

If Bruce wants Clark to stop being in love with him, he probably shouldn't kiss him so much. But Clark isn't feeling particularly motivated to explain that to him right now.

Bruce eases away.

"Okay," Clark says quietly, and looks at him. "There's a ship for us on one of the landing pads up there. Might be something in the engineering lockers I can use to get that thing off you."

"And a shirt," Bruce suggests.

"Not on my account," Clark murmurs—and Bruce shoots him a sharp look, but there's a visible flush climbing his throat, his face.

On the way to the ship, Bruce stays an appropriate half-stride behind Clark, a little to one side: at heel. It should be weirder than it is; but there's nowhere Clark would rather have Bruce than at his shoulder, safe and whole.

And as long as he's got that, whatever else does or doesn't happen, whatever else he wants and is never going to get—he can live with it.


	4. backwards from two lips apart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Superbat Week 2020 Day 4 prompt: "magic". LOOK, WHAT WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO. COME ON.

It's been two weeks.

The initial rush of effort to determine what happened, whether there was anything they could do, has died down. Diana can perceive the spell that holds Superman fast, but can't break it. Magic is irritating and inconsistent, but not precisely an untruth so much as it is a localized alteration of the state of reality, allowing otherwise impossible truths to be forced into being; the lasso is inapplicable, and Diana's own powers simply don't work that way.

Victor's run scans. He's absolutely certain there's nothing medically wrong with Clark, nothing physically preventing him from waking up. Arthur's gone back to Atlantis to attempt to determine whether any artifacts in their possession might be useful here. And Barry tried zapping Clark with his speed-generated lightning two or three times, and then made a hangdog face and left.

Zatanna's had no luck—and Bruce ordinarily disdains luck, but has to concede that with magic, that's what it is. She's been in and out of the Hall, the only disruption to the routine Bruce's days have settled into; she's tried everything she knows and a few things she didn't until she dug them up and gave them a shot. She's been in contact with Constantine, but Constantine is unreliable at best. There's no telling how long it might take him to get here, if he chooses to come at all.

It's a comfort, almost, that Clark is aware of none of it.

Victor's scans have proven useful in more than one respect. Clark's brain activity, like so many other things about him, is superficially analogous to that of ordinary humans. He is, as best Victor's been able to determine, sleeping. Dreaming.

He isn't conscious of the passage of time, has no idea they've been trying and failing to wake him for days and days. He's oblivious; at rest.

At first, Bruce had him hooked up to every piece of medical equipment that didn't require penetration of the skin—but that only lasted for about thirty-six hours, when they were first attempting to assess his condition. Superman is invulnerable to so many physical dangers, but the same isn't true of the metaphysical; magic is capable of injuring him, comprehensively and instantaneously.

This magic, however, hasn't done so. And at last Bruce had surrendered, had disconnected everything and moved Clark out of the medical wing.

Clark's suite in the Hall is on the top floor. Clark had given Bruce carte blanche to do as he pleased with it—which is to say that when asked to provide preferences, specifications, Clark had blinked and shrugged a shoulder, and said, "Really, it's fine. Whatever you want to do is fine. Don't worry about it."

So: Clark's suite is clean, comfortable. Moderated shades of blue and honey, splashes of eggshell and cream. A bed Clark almost never uses, which is for the best considering how mortifyingly self-conscious Bruce had felt purchasing it, even though it had been one among many, nothing significant about it except whose rooms it would end up in—except how difficult Bruce had found it to avoid picturing its future owner within it. And, of course, Bruce had knocked out the walls, half the ceiling, the better to install massive full-length windows and turn the roof into one single enormous angled skylight.

There's no real need to monitor Clark's vitals continuously, with Clark asleep in the sun all day long.

And Bruce doesn't sit there watching him. Not all the time.

He checks on Clark in the mornings; pointless habit, but it's reassuring on a fundamental animal level Bruce has resigned himself to, to be able to stand there and listen to him breathe. Bruce has a direct feed connected to the Hall's security on his private phone, and always has. He can depart to put in an appearance at Bruce Wayne's office, attend Bruce Wayne's meetings and social events, and pause to monitor Clark's condition intermittently from anywhere. He returns to the Hall before departing for either patrol or any pre-existing evening commitments of Bruce Wayne's, and as long as he's there, it's simply efficient to return—another hit of reassurance to his hindbrain, so it will settle and allow him to concentrate.

When he's finished for the night, he's often drawn back to Clark's bedside yet again. He's infuriatingly incapable of preventing it. Moonlight illuminates Clark's features so differently from sunlight; but they are always the same. Slack, relaxed. Peaceful.

Clark moves, rarely. Shifts position, a little. His magical sleep appears to be unnaturally deep. He doesn't turn over onto either side; no flicker of expression crosses his face. He lies there silently. He's alive. He's fine.

He's utterly, terribly, unbearably absent.

Two weeks. In retrospect, it's a miracle Bruce lasts even that long before he breaks and makes the attempt.

It's one of the late nights.

Bruce has finished patrol. He's sore, a little tired. He was shot several times tonight; the suit prevented any real injury, of course, but his ribs are bruised. He's showered, changed, and he should leave the Hall and return to the lake house.

He doesn't do it.

He climbs the stairs, begrudging himself every step but nevertheless failing to turn around, and he goes to Clark's rooms.

Clark's lying there, just as Bruce left him earlier today. There's some cloud cover tonight, and the moon is thin and waning anyway. The room is only dimly lit, Clark a half-formed paler swathe of shadow on the bed, face indistinct. Bruce's heart contracts unbidden in his chest regardless.

Bruce crosses the room, and looks at him.

The thought's crossed his mind before. Of course it has. He remains distantly disgusted with himself for even contemplating it, but at the same time there's only so much blame he can direct at himself when he's undeniably culturally primed to recognize this particular fairytale.

Fucking magic.

Bruce closes his eyes, and swallows.

It would be foolish to dismiss one of the few options remaining untried. Just because it feels ridiculous, just because everything in Bruce recoils instinctively from the possibility—the trap of it. Failure should be neutral, plausibly due to no deeper truth than that this spell may function according to rules different from those watered-down depictions with which Bruce is familiar. But it will feel excruciating; it will feel deserved, just punishment for the self-importance, the _arrogance_ , of allowing himself to believe for even a moment that his feelings should carry such weight, such significance. And success—

Success would constitute an exposure of vulnerability so extreme Bruce can barely contemplate it.

Steps can be taken, he reminds himself. That exposure can be limited to the one enemy over whom he has achieved a genuine measure of control: himself.

He leaves Clark's suite. An incident can be arranged; there's an opening he's been working to close since he discovered it yesterday, a minor but glaring faultline in the Hall's security that could reasonably cause a temporary glitch. But he's not about to let the cameras go dark on the image of him gazing down helplessly at Clark's sleeping face.

He goes to the equipment room. He is, to all appearances, assessing the area of the armor where he took those gunshots and calling up the suit schematics on one of the equipment room terminals when all the interlinked security systems in the building abruptly fail. No one is in the monitor room. No one is even going to notice, until Bruce encounters evidence of the error while reviewing footage in the morning, sends out a notification to alert the rest of the League, and grimly applies himself to correcting the problem immediately instead of working on it here and there the way he's been doing.

He leaves the armor where it is, and returns upstairs.

He doesn't even know what to hope for. It would be a desperate relief to be able to fix this himself, and so easily—even if it is gratingly offensive that the nature of magic renders a solution this stupid worth consideration. And now that the moment is upon him, it feels even more transparently self-deluding, to let himself believe for even an instant that this fixation, this obsession he's cultivated over Clark, actually possesses any objective validity. Let alone enough to match its strength against a spell capable of incapacitating Superman for weeks.

But: there is a chance, however slim. As spell-breaking techniques go, this one is low-impact, low-risk, undemanding; it requires no equipment, no supplies, and no expertise.

It would be even stupider _not_ to try it, under the circumstances.

He draws a slow breath, and seats himself on the edge of the bed.

The sheets are clean, soft, a medium blue that appears dark gray in the colorless dimness. Bruce chose the shade himself; in the absence of any directive from Clark, there had been no reason not to indulge.

He braces himself on an open hand, and with the other, he touches Clark's face.

He hasn't let himself, until now. There was no possible justification for it. His own desperate, selfish desire for the comfort of assuring himself of Clark's physical presence had been too irrational to qualify.

But Christ, it feels good to be able to do this. To sit so close, to look down and drink him in, freed even temporarily from the constraints by which Bruce would ordinarily require himself to abide—to go unobserved, unremarked, even by Clark himself.

Bruce closes his eyes, bends: just to press his temple to Clark's, his jaw prickling against two weeks' dark uneven growth, too long to be called stubble but too short to qualify as a beard. Bruce had already been contemplating whether it merited breaking his own rules, to give Clark a careful shave—whether it would be worse to do it, for Clark to wake and learn how long it had been and deduce that he had, or to refrain and thereby tacitly concede that his own self-consciousness had overpowered him.

"Wake up," Bruce whispers, though there's no way Clark can hear him. "Wake up, damn you."

And then he turns his face into Clark's—brushes that bristling cheek, blindly finds Clark's mouth, and kisses it.

As far as he knows, the touch is all that's required of him. No extravagance is necessary. A simple closemouthed press of lips will suffice.

But if it will ever be excusable to allow the full force of sentiment to move him, it is now.

He's kissed Clark deeply, thoroughly. He's licked Clark's mouth open and sucked on Clark's tongue, slicked his own along Clark's teeth, dragged a long slow bite along Clark's lower lip until it's red and wet and swollen. He's accepted Clark's own kisses readily, without hesitation, and taken all that Clark's been willing to give him.

But tenderness, reverence, raw and unrestrained devotion, have not been permitted to enter the picture. Clark would have felt it—would have felt it and welcomed it. To him, confirmation of reciprocated sentiment would be all that's required; the lack of it to date is the only thing that's kept him from throwing himself bodily at Bruce, which is exactly why Bruce has carefully refrained from giving it to him.

Now, though, the one set of circumstances under which Bruce can be certain he's unaware of it are in effect.

Bruce is allowed, and he takes full advantage.

He draws away without haste, eyes hot and squeezed firmly shut. He breathes. He digs his teeth into the inside of his lip, and stands, and makes himself wait.

He hopes. He resents himself for hoping. He's furious and desperate, furious at himself for feeling desperate.

And then Clark draws a deeper, sharper breath; the sound of it catching in his throat fills the room, unmistakably a change from the steady shallow way he's been breathing in his sleep. He moves. The shadow of an uncertain furrow crosses his brow.

He's waking up.

There is no trace of Bruce's presence in the room by the time Clark's eyes blink open.

The Hall's security systems detect their own malfunction and reset themselves in time for the cameras to record his first uncertain, half-focused glance around the room—the hand he raises to rub at his eyes, the way he pushes himself up unsteadily and looks around, dazed, sleep-soft, entirely alone.

It shouldn't have worked. But it did.

The worst part is how undeniably validating it is. How _gratifying_. That the unfathomable arcane rules that govern magic should have looked at Bruce, at the way he feels, and taken his measure, and said: yes. Yes, that is real. That is real, and true, and powerful; that means something—

It doesn't. It can't. He refuses to let it. He refuses to be so selfish as to assert that his preoccupation with Clark means he's allowed to demand anything of Clark, or should be confessed or revealed to Clark as though worth Clark's time or attention. Clark would believe it is, but Clark is wrong about all kinds of things all the time. Clark's well-being and safety and happiness are worth so much more to Bruce than the opportunity to close the distance between them, and all Bruce needs to do to guarantee them to him is wait in silence until he gives up on Bruce at last.

But—it worked.

It worked, and with it he was able to wake Clark up.

Fitting, in a way, that he should be forced to stop resenting himself for it once it's proven to him that at a bare minimum it actually possesses some genuinely tangible utility.

Fucking magic.


	5. some little story about dignity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Superbat Week 2020 Day 5, which is a free prompt-of-your-choice day! So I generously gave myself the prompt of "kiss pollen" (or, well, sex pollen that's softened accidentally into kiss pollen, as it were), to help round out my selection of "ridiculous reasons to be kissing more times". :D

It takes Clark some time to figure out what's wrong with Bruce.

To be fair to him, even if Bruce weren't being Bruce about it, it would be hard to tell. Bruce isn't gushing blood from anywhere; his bones are all still in the right places. The Batsuit is intact. His breathing, his heart rate, are accelerated, but those are about the least worrisome symptoms of "something wrong with Bruce" that Clark can think of—and also not particularly helpful, in terms of trying to narrow down the list of possibilities.

Clark threw himself into the air the moment he heard Bruce's scraping, dragging footsteps. An instant's view of Bruce, as Clark speeds into the Hall's entranceway in a rush of air, is all Clark needs to get a good look.

And then he's there, catching Bruce halfway through a fumbling, uncertain step. Which is such an alarming thing to have to do that Clark almost thinks he missed something. Bruce's body is taut underneath the suit, the muscles in his arms and legs clenching and unclenching in rippling spasms—he's got to be in some kind of pain, so bad he can barely walk. But Clark can't smell any blood, can't taste it in the air, except from where Bruce has been biting into his lip so hard he's drawn it. Bruce is—

Bruce is soaking wet, Clark realizes, head to toe. Soaking wet and shuddering, helpless, teeth gritted so hard Clark can hear the creak of enamel.

"Bruce—"

"Ivy," Bruce bites out. "Plants. Pollen. Had to—wash it off."

He's been exposed to something. Exposed to something, and he hosed himself down, threw himself in the bay, whatever it was he could manage to do even when he's like this, to avoid exposing anyone else secondhand.

"Okay, hang on," Clark says. It's more of a warning than an instruction; it doesn't matter what kind of grip Bruce has on Clark, there's no way in hell Clark's going to drop him. But in this condition, disoriented, flushed, clearly struggling to concentrate, Clark doesn't want to take him by surprise.

Bruce blinks, once, twice, and then swallows—manages, with what appears to be nearly superhuman effort, to meet Clark's eyes, and fumbles a hand up to curl his gloved fingers into Clark's shirt.

Good enough, Clark thinks, and lifts him a handful of inches off the floor, turning in the air to fly them both straight to the medical wing.

There's nobody around. Clark settles Bruce on one of the clean raised beds, and is about to send a notification to Diana, Alfred—Victor, in case he can detect something the equipment in here can't. But Bruce's half-clenched hand lands on his before he can actually activate his communicator.

"Don't," Bruce grits out.

"Bruce, I don't—I have no idea how to handle this," Clark says. Jesus, Bruce's jaw looks flushed; Clark reaches out, grabs at the back of the cowl, because he's starting to think Bruce's motor control isn't good enough to work the catch.

He pulls it away, and Bruce's bare face is the same way, hot color blazing in the apples of his cheeks, across his forehead. He looks feverish, eyes huge and dark, jaw tight. And he obviously isn't able to focus on Clark, to keep track of what's going on, without a lot more effort than usual. He's blinking rapidly, breathing hard—shifting convulsively in place, starting to curl in on himself, like his body hurts too much not to.

"Look, just stay here for a minute—"

" _No_ ," Bruce snaps, hand tightening on Clark's wrist, making a tight movement that almost tips him back off the bed.

"I don't know what you need," Clark says, trying to keep it steady, soothing. "I don't know how to help you."

Bruce squeezes his eyes shut, throat working. He jerks his hands away from Clark's, closing them awkwardly around each other—it takes Clark a second to realize he's trying to take off his gloves. Clark reaches for him, makes an absent gentle noise in his throat, and helps Bruce tug them free; their fingers are tangling, their palms brushing, and Bruce's hands are trembling violently, Bruce's breath coming fast and harsh in his throat.

Clark doesn't even have a chance to set the gloves aside. Bruce knocks them away, twists his hands and grabs desperately, unseeingly, for Clark's arms, his shoulders, his face. "Bruce," Clark says, cautious, just trying to steady him.

And then, in a sudden lurching rush of motion, Bruce is kissing him.

Clark is, for an instant, stunned motionless. He'd been expecting a handful of things, none of them good: for Bruce to vomit, or start seizing, or faint; stop recognizing him, or hit him, or panic. He hadn't thought for a second that Bruce was going to—not that he _minds_ —

And it's right then that he starts to feel it.

Bruce is still kissing him, clumsy and hard, like he can't get enough, like he can't stand it. But the tremors in Bruce's hands are slowing, settling. Clark catches, somewhere that seems very far away, a choked sound: an uncontrolled, voiceless hitch, a half-sob of breath.

Bruce is half-seated, leaning over the edge of the bed and into Clark, pressed as close as he can get. And his body is—Clark can feel that wrung-out tension melting away, gradual but unmistakable, the coiled line of him easing out in relief.

The pain. The pain's gone. Or going, at least.

Clark makes a muffled, bewildered sound into Bruce's mouth, and all at once Bruce seems to realize what he's done, what they're doing—he jerks back, twisting his face away, bare hands withdrawn and clamped to his sides instead.

He's still breathing hard, chest heaving, face and throat red with heat over the collar of the Batsuit. His mouth is wet, shining, and Clark looks at it for much too long.

"I, uh," Clark says, and clears his throat. " _That_ helps? Why would Ivy—"

"It was supposed to be debilitating," Bruce says flatly, and okay, it _definitely_ helped if he's up to forming five-syllable words again. "Incapacitating. She's attempted to induce similar effects before." He breathes in, out, slow and deliberate. "I formulated an antidote. It was—partially effective."

"So without the antidote, you'd have been—" Clark stops, ears hot, suddenly aware that maybe he doesn't want to know how that sentence ends.

"More extreme measures would have been required," Bruce agrees even more flatly, "in order to achieve relief."

Jesus Christ. Clark swallows, and tries really hard not to imagine how exactly that would have turned out.

Bruce's weight shifts the barest degree.

Clark looks at him.

The expression on his face hasn't changed. He's seated, tense but not straining. He's watching Clark without apparent distress—not more than before, anyway, when he's still flushed everywhere Clark can see bare skin, his pulse racing unevenly in Clark's ears.

But he doesn't have his gloves on. And his knuckles have gone pale, his hands clenched up tight.

"Bruce," Clark says slowly.

"Get out," Bruce says, without inflection.

Clark doesn't move. "It's happening again. This won't stop until it wears off, will it?"

Bruce's jaw works. He's gritting his teeth again. "Clark," he says, and then breaks off, as if to disguise where his voice would have given out on him anyway. "Get out. Now."

Clark knows what to look for this time. He can see the fractional movements of muscles jumping, the convulsive spasms starting to take hold again.

"Are you kidding me?" Clark reaches out, closes his hands over the backs of Bruce's fists—that helps too, he sees, bare skin on bare skin sending a wave of involuntary response, an instant's relieved slackening, through Bruce's body.

But it's not half as effective as the kissing was.

"Clark—"

"I can help you with this. You know I can. Don't send me away." Clark bites his lip. "Please."

Bruce sways in place, eyes squeezing shut.

Just for a few seconds, Clark tells himself, just long enough to give Bruce a minute where he can think clearly. He leans in, presses his mouth to Bruce's; he keeps it soft, undemanding, almost closemouthed.

Bruce draws a ragged breath, and lets him. And when Clark moves away again—just far enough to meet Bruce's eyes, that's all—he can tell already that it worked.

"Bruce," Clark says quietly, and waits until Bruce looks at him. "It's not going to make this any worse. You know that. You have to know that."

"Don't," Bruce grates out, tensing again, twisting away like it's Clark who's hurting him and not his own body, not whatever Ivy had her plants spit in his face.

"I'm not going to be any less hopeless over you if you shove me out there and make me wait, knowing you're in pain—knowing I could stop it if you would just let me."

It should have been harder to say. It's the first time either of them has actually acknowledged it out loud, the first time Clark's managed to put words to it.

And he was right after all, he thinks distantly. Bruce did know; Bruce has known all along. Bruce doesn't look surprised, or disbelieving. He doesn't even look annoyed. He's still turned half away from Clark, staring fixedly at the wall, throat working convulsively.

"I'm not saying you have to," Clark amends hurriedly. "If you ask me to leave again, I will. But I—you'll let me kiss you to lose a tail, or for a case, or as cover in a situation we could've blasted our way out of if we'd had to. But _not_ to keep you from having to lie in here seizing in agony for half the night? Because I have to tell you, as far as I'm concerned that's a _better_ reason than usual, not a worse one."

"Of course you think so," Bruce says, snide, lip curling. "Your judgment is blatantly compromised."

"Trying to get me to decide to leave on my own by being an asshole," Clark assesses evenly. "So you _aren't_ going to ask me to go."

Bruce doesn't answer. And, looking at him like this, Clark can't hang onto the frustration; the hot flash of it goes as fast as it came, watching Bruce dig his teeth into his trembling lip so hard it starts bleeding some more.

Shit. It must be getting bad again.

Clark lifts a hand to the side of Bruce's throat, sweeps his thumb up along Bruce's jaw. Bruce's sigh of relief is half-swallowed, but Clark can hear it anyway. "Sorry," he murmurs.

And then he brushes his mouth across Bruce's temple, his flushed cheek, that sore split-open lip.

"I'm not telling you I'm willing to," he says when he's done, against the corner of Bruce's mouth. "I'm telling you I _want_ to. You know I do. This is—" He stops, almost tempted to laugh, for all the wrong reasons. "Jesus, this is nothing. This is easy, this is the least you could possibly ask of me. This is exactly what I want to be doing, every second of every day. Except for the part where if I stop for too long, the thumbscrews start up again, obviously—"

Bruce makes a low strained sound in the back of his throat, and turns into Clark. Their noses bump, their chins; and then they're kissing again.

And this time it isn't the bare minimum. This time it isn't a stopgap Clark's applying to give Bruce a chance to string a thought together. Bruce leans into Clark's hands, grips Clark by the shoulder, slides increasingly steady fingers into Clark's hair. Bruce kisses him and kisses him and kisses him.

Knowing why it's happening should be enough to stop it from feeling good, the way Bruce is relaxing into Clark by degrees. But it's not. God, it's gratifying. Kissing for ten minutes straight buys them the breathing room to part for a little longer than before: long enough for Bruce to peel off his outer armor, long enough to actually nudge him into lying down on the bed. Clark sticks close, climbs on right there with him and settles in over him without waiting—touches his face, thumbs the corner of his mouth, and Bruce actually turns into Clark's hand. He's dark-eyed and pliant and pink; he looks _drunk_. On the absence of pain, not on kissing. It shouldn't be so hard to remember that.

They've never kissed for this long before. They settle into it after the first half-hour or so, develop an easy give-and-take that picks up a momentum of its own. It should get boring, probably, just lying in here going at it like this—Clark's careful to hold himself up, to keep his hips away from Bruce, because even without any help, any pressure, he's half-hard, an unmistakable thickening weight he makes himself ignore.

But he doesn't mind. He's going to spend the next five years jerking off over every single second of this, sure—but he doesn't mind.

How can he? It's stupid, selfish; but it fills Clark with greedy heat anyway, to be able to do this for Bruce. Not a teammate or a fellow investigator, not Superman, not any of Clark's senses or powers or abilities. Just Clark, his hands, his mouth. He wanted to, he admitted it, and Bruce let him.

It's enough.

It takes almost four hours for the dose Bruce got to wear off completely.

Or—it takes almost four hours for them to stop long enough to realize that it has.

Those are probably the same thing.

Probably.


	6. body the white flag

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Superbat Week 2020 Day 6 prompt: "serious injuries". ... SORRY, CLARK.

Clark's confession, his open allusion to his own feelings, was not a surprise. Bruce doesn't treat it like one.

Clark's—prescribed course of treatment, so to speak, was effective. Bruce would have survived without help; but he's able to confirm, through tests on one of the samples he'd collected and secured in the suit before utterly losing his mind, that the impacts of the pollen worked their way through his system faster when he wasn't resisting them than they would have otherwise. He might have been incapacitated through the night and into the next morning, if Clark hadn't been there.

If Clark hadn't been there, hadn't been smart enough to understand what Bruce wasn't telling him and stubborn enough to insist. To _plead_ , Christ. Impossible to refuse, even if Bruce hadn't been riding the euphoria that followed that intense, sourceless physical pain so utterly and thoroughly evaporating. Clark's bare hands against his skin had eased it. But Clark's mouth—Clark's mouth had eliminated it entirely, every inch of Bruce's body tuned that critical fraction more literally than usual to the presence or absence of Clark's lips against his.

It had felt almost appropriate. Of course agony fled before Clark, banished. The earth was salted, it could not flourish; or perhaps the right way to say it was that there simply was no room for it, no open ground where it could take root, when something already endemic, established, impossible to eradicate, was busy bursting into bloom at every touch of Clark's fingertips, at the curl of his hair and the color of his eyes, at the sheer delicious weight and heat of his body against Bruce's—

But enough. It's over.

Bruce spends the next week tweaking the antidote, testing. It won't happen again. He can't let it.

This is about managing risk. It always has been. And he can't take the risk that another incident like that one will weaken his resolve enough to let something slip through where Clark can see it.

Because Clark is smart, and Clark is stubborn. And if he becomes aware that Bruce is enduring a continual if much less tangible agony, an agony that could be relieved by him in a moment, he's proven already he won't let it go, can't be made to prize his own comfort or convenience over the opportunity to offer that relief.

This is about managing risk, about Bruce maintaining clear-eyed control of the degree of that risk because Clark won't do it for him. About saving Clark from himself, from his own open-hearted willingness to make a mistake Bruce can prevent him from making.

This is about ensuring Bruce never again has a chance to hurt Clark, because he's already proven he can't be trusted not to.

But perhaps he should have spent a little more time preparing for the possibility that something else would.

The last civilian has been evacuated from the immediate area for over an hour, by the time the building comes down.

The bomb threat directed toward the Justice League had been rambling, incoherent. Inexplicit, and without clear locational clues to follow. They have a general idea where to start, but this area of the Gotham waterfront is old and badly maintained, nothing up to code; ancient lead piping left corroding in place has hampered Superman's efforts to locate the devices that have been planted.

They learned more than one was involved about half an hour ago. Victor had found the first explosive, but they'd all agreed that they couldn't be sure it was the only one—and then a second had gone off two blocks away, though thankfully not with the full force that had been intended; they're not well-constructed bombs.

Barry's able to perform sweeps quickly, but the need to be thorough slows even him. Diana's monitoring the perimeter, making sure the area remains clear until they're finished. And Arthur gets a few good pointers out of the fish closest to the waterfront that help them locate a third and a fourth in relatively short order.

Clark might not be able to see as well as usual, but his speed is still second only to Barry's. Bruce is coordinating between him and Barry, tracking their respective progress as they work their way through the area in a grid search.

He's crouched on top of the Batwing, hovering over the water and waiting for Clark to report, when it happens.

Some of the oldest buildings at the outermost shoreline began to sink years ago, their lowest floors swallowed up by silt and the lapping waters of the bay. It hasn't been a problem; Barry can move so quickly through water that he doesn't have time to start drowning, if he's careful not to pause for too long. And Clark breathes, but not because he needs to—Kryptonians must, under a red sun, but not Clark, not on Earth. For him, the reflex is effectively vestigial.

There's no cause for concern in the fact that Clark is in the water when the bomb goes off, nor in the fact that it's apparently down there with him when it does. There's a surge, sudden roiling spray and a shockwave that sets Bruce back on his heels, the Batwing yawing automatically beneath him to compensate for the change in the distribution of his weight. The noise of the explosion is muffled, but this close, the infrasound goes bone-deep.

The building creaks, trembles; sways, visible and briefly disorienting. Steadies into stillness, for a long stretched-out moment. And then, in an abrupt rush much louder than the underwater explosion that caused it, collapse occurs.

Another device neutralized, if non-optimally—though for all Bruce knows, Clark decided setting it off would be easier than removing it safely, and did that on purpose, aware that he was the only one in the immediate vicinity. Bruce notes the location, the coordinates, and updates the list using the Batwing's exterior console, on the off chance that analysis will yield a pattern they can use to narrow their search area.

He's done. He looks at the seething, gradually settling water with a faint frown.

Clark still hasn't come up.

Bruce tenses. He'd formed a vague estimate automatically, rough accounting in the back of his mind, pure habit. Now he monitors the seconds deliberately. Ten, fifteen. Twenty. Thirty.

Clark hasn't come up. The water of the bay is smoothing out—undisturbed, unbroken by any motion distinct from the remains of the building settling.

Something's wrong.

Bruce activates his comm, barks out a sharp status update to Diana and doesn't wait for a response. He reaches the edge of the Batwing in a single movement, and dives.

The water's cloudy, disturbed. The foundations of the building that fell in are a vague shadowed shape ahead of him, indistinct, dark, looming. Bruce kicks hard, closing in, and wonders absently what it would take to engineer his boots such that they could be made to contain collapsible swim fins. He doesn't end up in water often; but when he does, it would be helpful to have some extra propulsive capability available—

A dark, drifting stain is fanning out in the water ahead of him.

Blood.

His first thought is: civilian. His first thought is that it's no wonder Clark's stayed down so long, if there's someone they missed, someone trapped, someone he thinks he might still be able to save.

He always wants to save everyone. It's one of the best and most frustrating things about him.

Except—Victor had confirmed this area clear. He'd been able to scan for heat, for moving bodies, if not for the bombs themselves. The odds that they missed someone are incredibly slim.

Bruce kicks closer, and spots a shimmering gleam of blue.

The uniform. Superman. The blood is thicker here, darker—god, it's _Clark's_ —

For a moment, what he's seeing is impossible to parse. He can't understand it. Clark is limp, eyes closed, face slack, his head and one arm and shoulder subtly following the motion of the water. He's caught, trapped under what had been—and still is, if in a different sense of the term—a load-bearing I-beam, the weight of a wall and a pile of rubble pressing down into him. A pattern of wounds snakes up the side of his torso that Bruce can see, larger and deeper at the waist, smaller going up, all the way to tiny splintered cuts along the side of his face, his ear. He's bleeding freely from all of them.

Except he isn't. He can't be. He's _Superman_ , for Christ's sake.

Bruce is almost close enough to reach for him. One more steady kick, and he can close a hand around Clark's wrist, grip Clark's face with the other. Clark's eyes flicker open, unfocused. Bubbles escape from his mouth.

That's when Bruce spots the first glinting shard of green.

Kryptonite. Embedded, barely visible, in one of the wounds just under Clark's ear.

That alone wouldn't be enough to do this. There must be more, a larger piece, buried here somewhere. The original bomb threat—it had been directed to the League. Whoever had done it had known who they were facing; had set this trap on purpose.

Clark can heal from the wounds, if the kryptonite is gone. The biggest problem right now isn't that he's bleeding. It's that he's drowning.

Bruce performed only the most perfunctory breathe-up before he dove in here. Of all the potential problems that had crossed his mind, needing enough air for two people hadn't been one of them. But he still has more than he needs to surface without difficulty.

He tips Clark's face in his hands, and seals their mouths together.

Clark jerks beneath him. He must be confused, disoriented; he must not have any idea what's happening, except that he's in pain and he can't breathe and he doesn't know why.

So it's lucky, in a sense, that there's an established pattern of behavior for him to draw on, in response to Bruce's lips against his. It's lucky that Bruce can rely on Clark to react by cooperating, by readily, mindlessly opening his mouth under Bruce's.

Bruce grips Clark's jaw tightly, and breathes air into Clark's mouth; and Clark's starved, shocked lungs reflexively draw it in.

Bruce uses his hand to force Clark's mouth shut, draws away and meets Clark's eyes—and this time Clark is looking back, dazed but undeniably more visibly present than he had been. Bruce holds up one finger, waits for Clark's gaze to focus on it: _Wait._

Clark blinks acknowledgment. The instant Bruce sees it, he twists in the water and kicks straight up, heart pounding, until he breaks the surface of the bay with a gasp.

He activates his communicator again. A soft tone alerts the others that his channel's reopened, and Diana immediately says, "What is it?"

"Kryptonite," Bruce bites out. "S is down—trapped. Someone with super-strength needs to get here _now_."

He only had one word out before the surface of the bay shifted in the distance, a wave rising. Arthur, already on the way.

Bruce closes his eyes, and breathes: deep, a full exhale, deep again.

Clark isn't going to die down there. Bruce won't allow it.

He dives.

It's six more breaths before they can get Clark out of the water.

Given Clark's condition, there's a limit to how quickly Arthur can dig him out; injuring him further is acceptable, since he'll be able to heal it away without difficulty once he's free. But crushing him entirely is not. Some caution is required.

Diana shows up after another breath, moving effortlessly in her armor. And either of them could take over for Bruce, except they're the ones with the strength to lift all this off of Clark.

The only thing Bruce can do for him is breathe.

Bruce dives straight down; finds Clark, his hands, his face; meets Clark's eyes and then presses his mouth to Clark's, opens it and gives up every cubic inch of air he can spare. Again, again. Again.

On the third breath, Clark reaches back, slides a shaking thumb along the side of Bruce's throat. On the fifth, he holds Bruce there for an extra moment, even after Bruce has broken the contact of their mouths—he's pale against the dark water, gripping Bruce with briefly greater tension when a spasm of pain racks him, gazing at Bruce with hazy, blurred eyes.

On the sixth breath, Bruce eases away, and Diana is signaling to him with one hand. He waits. She and Arthur look at each other and nod, seize what's left of the wall and the I-beam beneath it, and Bruce is already gripping Clark by the shoulder, the waist; he can feel it the instant Clark comes free.

Clark's weak with pain. It doesn't matter. In the water, his weight alone is readily maneuverable.

They break the surface together, and Clark heaves, curling in on himself, coughing in thin harsh wheezes—Bruce already brought the Batwing low over the water, and it's the work of a moment's furiously focused effort to haul him up onto its surface.

Green, green, green; Christ, it's everywhere. The bomb must have been full of it, designed to disperse it as shrapnel as forcefully as possible. There's two significant holes in Clark's uniform where larger chunks tore their way in. Bruce rips his gloves off and then grips Clark's face with one hand, forces Clark to look at him.

"Bruce," Clark gasps, hoarse.

"This is going to hurt," Bruce says.

"Already—hurts—"

Bruce maintains eye contact even as he digs his fingers in, forcing himself to ignore the sticky heat of blood on his hand; Clark doesn't look away either, face white, sharp lines carving themselves in at the corners of his eyes, around his mouth. His breath is labored, when it isn't choked in pain. He's tense, shaking. But he doesn't make a sound.

A hard edge beneath Bruce's fingertips. Not bone. He pulls the piece of kryptonite free of the wound and hurls it into the water—they're going to be sweeping the rubble of the building for the rest of it anyway. It'll be found again, and right now it's much more important to get it the hell away from Clark than it is to keep track of it.

"Okay," Clark grits out, "you were right, that did hurt."

"One more," Bruce says.

Clark wets his lips and wraps a hand around Bruce's on his jaw, thumb curled against Bruce's palm, and then drags a ragged breath. "All right. All right—"

This one is bigger. Bruce works it free, doesn't let himself falter at the way Clark twists involuntarily under his hands; and the moment it's out, even still held within two feet of Clark, Clark's breathing more easily, eyes clearing. Bruce flings it away.

It's a clear afternoon. The Batwing is hovering in full sun. Clark is soaked, dripping, and flooded with warm light from head to toe—even as Bruce watches, the worst of the bloody gashes in his gut begin to close, flesh knitting itself together. Now that the bulk of the kryptonite is gone, the effect of the remaining splinters is sharply limited; they slide free of Clark's face and side, unceremoniously ejected as Clark heals faster and faster.

Clark lets his head fall back against the Batwing. "Jesus," he breathes.

Full concentration is no longer required. Bruce clings to it, but can't hold on. He can't—he isn't able to do anything but curl in over Clark, head bowed. The cowl is on. He covers his face with his hand anyway, mindless, irrational.

"Bruce," Clark says.

His other hand is still trapped beneath Clark's, against Clark's face. He should withdraw it.

He doesn't.

"Bruce, I'm okay."

"Yes," Bruce makes himself say, grateful for the vocal modulator's effect on the steadiness of his delivery.

It's too long before he can make himself sit up and let go. But Clark doesn't push him away.

He thought the worst thing that could happen to Clark was him.

He thought the worst thing that could happen to Clark was him, and so he took steps to minimize that danger. He hadn't expected to be confronted so viscerally by—by the prospect of losing Clark not to his own error but to simple chance. Losing Clark, and in the full awareness that all he's done while he's had Clark is deliberately, knowingly make Clark unhappy, by keeping something he's admitted to wanting deeply concealed thoroughly out of his reach.

He told himself he wanted to ensure that he would be unable to harm Clark. But he's left Clark to suffer a pain he could choose instead to relieve, sheer brass-balled hypocrisy he had steadfastly refused to acknowledge.

He'd stood at Clark's graveside and promised to do better. And then he'd slid back right into the rut of picking the worst threat he could perceive and deciding that it was the only one that mattered—that averting it was worth any cost.

That's not what Clark deserves from him. It never has been.

Bruce failed him again.

But if there's anyone who might be willing to forgive him for it, it's Clark.


	7. sang to beat the heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Superbat Week 2020 Day 7 prompt: "first kiss". ... Obviously I'm defining "first" a little loosely here. :D I just hope you guys enjoy this, and thank you so much for sticking with me through another Superbat Week! ♥

Clark doesn't realize anything's up, at first.

Bruce doesn't act weird. Or at least not weirder than usual. Clark was expecting him to be difficult, upset in that way where he goes to ridiculous lengths to seem like he's not upset—he gets like that sometimes when Clark's done something he thinks was stupid or risky, something he's decided Clark shouldn't have done. Getting a little bit blown up with kryptonite would usually qualify, Clark's pretty sure.

But Bruce doesn't get snippy, and he doesn't start looming, and he doesn't corner Clark and start listing off Clark's tactical errors.

He was worried. He was worried and he let it show, crouched over Clark in silence while Clark gasped and shook and slowly started to remember what it felt like not to be in pain. And usually after something like that happens, he gets weird.

Part of the reason Clark's waiting for another shoe to drop is because he does keep catching Bruce looking at him. Not just that day, long after he's recovered and picks up another building or two to prove it; but the rest of the week, whenever they're at the Hall together, whenever they're inside fifty feet of each other.

But Bruce doesn't say anything to him. He isn't any more snappish or pointed in his instructions over mission comms than usual. He isn't even avoiding Clark, slipping away every time Clark gets anywhere near him.

And—well. It's not like Clark _minds_ Bruce's eyes on him. If realizing he's got Bruce's attention every time he looks up is anything, it's a pleasure. And Bruce probably knows it, so if he's doing it anyway, Clark's not going to go to the effort of talking him out of it.

The week after, Bruce raises the subject of an evening's surveillance, in a leading sort of way that Clark recognizes. Bruce never exactly asks for help outright; he just mentions things he's working on, and days, times, and waits for Clark to say whether he's busy with anything, whether he'd be able to come along or not.

He's still—watching Clark, when he does it this time, in that piercing intent way. But that's the only thing that's strange about it.

"Sure," Clark says, and Bruce gives him a nod and then pauses.

"Wear something nice," Bruce adds evenly, and then leaves.

So: it all seems pretty normal, and Clark doesn't realize anything's up.

He does wear something nice: a suit, dark blue, pinstripes so thin they're barely there. Bruce made him get it after the last time he needed to meet Bruce Wayne somewhere where Clark Kent wouldn't usually make it past the velvet ropes. So presumably he can trust it to meet Bruce's standards.

Bruce didn't give him an address, so he touches down on the dock at the lake house at exactly seven o'clock, as specified. When it's Bruce's own business, not a League matter, Bruce always prefers the lake house over the Hall.

Bruce is waiting at the door for him, and steps out before Clark can come in. He looks—good. Not that he doesn't always, but Bruce-Wayne-good is different from Batman-good, and Clark gets to see it a lot less often.

Clark carefully doesn't swallow his own tongue, and manages to say hello instead, without even sounding too blatantly weak in the knees when he does.

Bruce meets his eyes and smiles just a little, and then sweeps a long, lingering onceover from Clark's face to his feet, and back up.

"Good," Bruce says, low, pricked with gravel.

Clark doesn't shiver. But it's a close thing for a second.

They take one of Bruce's cars. Bruce drives it himself, which Clark wasn't expecting; usually when they're using Bruce Wayne for cover, Bruce goes for the whole nine yards, a limo, a driver, Clark across from him in the back trying not to touch anything. It feels—different, sliding into the passenger seat beside him, closed into what suddenly seems like not very much space at all and knowing it's just the two of them.

"So, uh," Clark says. "Where are we going?"

"Tierce," Bruce says.

Clark blinks, and tugs absently at his collar. He'd skipped a tie, opened the top button; he'd figured it wasn't that big a deal, when they were just doing some surveillance. But now he's kind of wishing he'd gone the extra mile. Tierce—jesus. That's the best French restaurant in Gotham.

"Oh," he manages.

Bruce gives him a sidelong look; his expression is bland, pleasant, but Clark's pretty sure he deliberately held on to that particular tidbit until he had Clark in the car. "Denning likes to eat there, but his schedule is often irregular. He sometimes switches venues at the last minute for security reasons. He may be late, or not show at all." He pauses for a deliberate beat. "You might end up choking down a plate of roast duck for nothing."

"I'm sure I'll survive the disappointment somehow," Clark murmurs.

He can't feel awkward in the face of Bruce's gentle teasing. It's just not possible. His mouth's already trying to tug itself into a smile, and he lets it.

Because Bruce is making this sound—easy. Low-key, despite the setting. Maybe even fun. There's clearly no immediate danger here, if Bruce isn't wound up about the possibility that Denning might not show at all; he's probably thinking he can at least establish a pattern of behavior, that Bruce Wayne likes to eat at Tierce, too, and settle in for the long haul if he has to.

So: negligible risk of loss of life or limb for anyone in the building. A nice dinner Clark's already pretty sure Bruce isn't going to let him pay for. And Bruce, across the table from him all night in that suit.

Yeah, okay. Clark can live with that.

The restaurant is beautiful. Elegant, all smooth dark wood and warm lighting, faceted glass and creamy linen—but not quite so breathtakingly fancy that Clark's afraid to breathe on anything. The tables are offset and placed at careful angles to each other so that they feel further apart than they are; there's the murmur of other voices, the low clink of silverware, a baseline awareness that they're in public, but it doesn't feel like it matters. It doesn't feel like there's anyone in this particular corner of the world right now except for them.

Denning isn't there when they arrive. Bruce doesn't seem concerned. They order appetizers, and Bruce selects a bottle of wine for them to split that Clark definitely doesn't want to know the price tag for. They wait.

They talk, of course. They're Bruce Wayne and his—and someone he brought here for dinner; the plan was never for them to sit here in silence not looking at each other. And Clark already knew that Bruce knows how to be warm, engaging, good company. Charming.

The tables are set with candles. The light does impossibly unfair things with the depth of Bruce's eyes, the lines of his jaw and cheekbones.

Denning doesn't show. Bruce shrugs, Bruce Wayne's untroubled ease, and tells Clark that in that case, he'd better start deciding what he wants as an entree.

It isn't a date. Clark would be kidding himself if he let himself think that it was. It's just—

It's just Bruce, inviting Clark here, telling him to wear a nice suit, driving him to an incredibly good restaurant, buying him dinner and watching him eat it and _looking_ at him like that.

It's not a date. Clark just needs to remember that.

There's not a single sign of Denning all night.

They eat, and talk, and laugh. Clark becomes aware that at some point, their shoes came into contact beneath the table; he doesn't move his feet, and neither does Bruce. They work their way through the wine, which is fantastic, and Bruce's smiles get smaller but not in a bad way. Warmer. More intimate. Less Bruce Wayne, and more—just Bruce.

They split a dessert, too, which looks a little intimidating but turns out to be three-quarters obscenely rich chocolate. Clark decides it's lucky he's already so full, or he'd order ten more of them.

For all that he's Superman, Clark somehow still manages to miss the moment Bruce pays. He's worried about it for half a second, dimly, as they're finally rising out of their chairs; and then Bruce informs him it's all taken care of, and Clark rolls his eyes and says, "Of course it is," but can't stop smiling.

The drive back to the lake house is quiet—a comfortable quiet neither of them seem to feel any pressing need to fill. Clark looks out the window at nighttime Gotham, the distant glitter of stars, and thinks it's the best evening he's had in a while. There's a sting in it, of course. There always is. But it's softened, transmuted: he feels the wistful ache of wishing this were more than it is, and cherishes it. It can't help but be a pleasure, to be able to spend time with Bruce this way; to know that Bruce was willing to, that Clark's stupid feelings can't screw them up beyond repair.

It doesn't feel like it takes long enough to get to the lake house. Clark almost wants to tell Bruce to turn around, to drive them around in endless circles instead, to make this last just a little longer.

But he doesn't.

The lake house is dark, and quiet. Clark gets out of the car, and then finds himself rounding it to—to walk Bruce to the door, a pointless impulse he doesn't manage to quell. Bruce gives him a long look, dark-eyed, but doesn't say anything, doesn't tell him to fuck off. Not even when Clark discovers he's let one hand drift to the small of Bruce's back, as if Bruce needs the guidance to make it the rest of the way to his own front door.

Jesus, Clark needs to get a grip.

They reach the house. Bruce turns just a little, and meets Clark's eyes again.

And it's then, right then, that everything suddenly flips on its head.

Because Clark _recognizes_ this moment. He can't help it. This is that pause, that awkward lingering moment where you stand there trying to decide whether you get to do what you want to, trying to decide whether you'd be rushing it if you did; whether to aim for the cheek or the mouth, whether to offer a nightcap or accept one, whether that really went as well as you thought it did or you're just fooling yourself—

"Holy shit," Clark says, hushed. "This _is_ a date."

Bruce goes very still, and doesn't look away.

"Would you like it to be?"

"Oh, come on," Clark says automatically. "You know the answer to that question. That's not a question at all." He still hasn't taken his hand off Bruce's back. He should probably take his hand off Bruce's back. "You really—you did that on purpose."

Bruce's expression flickers; he looks briefly and unmistakably cornered, before he smooths it carefully away. "Carter Denning has eaten at Tierce six times over the past—"

"Sure, sure, of course he has," Clark agrees. "And if he'd showed up tonight, we'd have kept an eye on him, and you'd have come up with a reason to pass his table and bugged his phone or cloned it or stuck a tracker on his collar, or whatever else it was you wanted to do. But that wasn't the point of all this, was it? If Carter Denning had never set foot in Tierce in his life, you'd have come up with something else."

Bruce stands there and looks at Clark, and keeps not moving out from under Clark's hand, and doesn't deny it. "I didn't intend," he says instead, and then stops. "I wasn't going to—"

"You were easing me into it," Clark says. "You were doing a dry run. Seeing whether it went well, whether I liked it. You were—" God, he must look like an idiot, but he can't stop smiling. "You were being _strategic_. Jesus, you are so _you_ —"

"It was my understanding," Bruce says, quiet, "that for some reason you consider that a feature, not a bug."

Clark laughs, a soft huff he can't prevent. "You could say that, yeah."

And this—this is his chance, at last. To kiss Bruce and have Bruce let him do it, not for a mission or a cover, not to spare either of them inconvenience or excruciating pain; just because he can. Just because he wants to. And if _Bruce_ doesn't want him to, then it's up to Bruce to not take Clark out on a goddamn date.

He reaches up and takes Bruce's face in his hand, and leans in. Brushes his nose against Bruce's, and Bruce lets out a quiet shaking breath at the touch, and suddenly Clark can't _not_ be kissing him.

Bruce is still, unmoving, against the pressure of Clark's mouth. But Clark's got his number now, and doesn't shy away. He eases off just a little, takes a breath, returns; and this time Bruce answers. Bruce kisses him back.

Hardly at all, at first. The barest cooperative motion, tentative uncertain counterpoint. And then, abruptly, Bruce sways into him—clasps the nape of his neck with one broad strong hand, thumb curling into his hair.

Clark's half expecting his tongue, next, coaxing Clark's mouth open, taking this up three or four gears at once with such smoothness Clark's not going to be able to do anything but go along. But instead—

He does part his lips, a little. But just to deepen the kiss a fraction, that's all. It isn't rushed, isn't desperate, isn't a hot sharp spark designed to light Clark on fire. It's— _tender_ , in a soft quiet way that makes Clark's eyes sting inexplicably.

Clark twists away, puts a breath of space between himself and Bruce and reaches up reflexively to touch his mouth.

"Bruce, you—" He stops, and helplessly shakes his head. "How long?"

He didn't—he thought that Bruce was just willing to try, that was all. That he'd finally accepted that Clark wasn't going to get over this on his timetable, and that he'd decided to give Clark a chance to convince him it might work.

But that was—

Clark closes his eyes, fingertips still pressed to his lips.

That was—hasn't that—hasn't Bruce—?

"You've kissed me like that before," he says.

He doesn't know why he says it. He doesn't—he can't quite remember, can't place the sensation.

"Yes," Bruce says quietly.

Clark looks at him. "You're going to tell me about that later," he says absently. "So you already—jesus." And he laughs again, helpless, fond. "You are so _stubborn_." He bites his lip and reaches out with the hand that was on his own mouth, touches Bruce's instead, the ghost of another kiss transferred. "For the record, if you want to take me on dates, you don't need to come up with a cover story. All you have to do is ask."

"I'm—still not sure this is a good idea," Bruce admits, low, letting his eyes fall shut.

"Really," Clark says, and tilts his head, rubs his thumb along the line of Bruce's lower lip. "Because I think it's a great idea." He leans in, brushes a kiss to Bruce's cheek, the corner of his mouth. "I think it's the best idea either of us has ever had," he adds, against Bruce's jaw.

And Bruce shivers against him, but doesn't tell him he's wrong—turns into Clark's touch, kisses him first this time: deeper, harder, sweet and close and lingering, like maybe he's wanted to all along.


End file.
